After years of hearing the hype about the European music streaming service Spotify, I was prepared to be underwhelmed when it debuted this year in the U.S. Instead, I fell deeply in love.

I played with the free version for several weeks, and upgraded to the premium service for $9.95 a month. I began to exhibit those unmistakable signs of obsession, wanting to tell every living being about the wonders of Spotify. It was those feverish first few days of a relationship that I was certain would last a lifetime.

Then, I met Erin McKeown.

The singer and songwriter happened to be speaking on a panel at a conference I was attending recently last week in Cambridge, Mass., called the Futures of Entertainment. During a discussion on the music industry, McKeown put up a chart showing what musicians make from a wide range of services. The audience gasped.

To make the monthly minimum wage of $1,160, a musician needed to sell 143 self-pressed compact discs. To make that from Spotify, they would need people to stream their songs more than 4 million times -- not humanly possible unless you happen to be Lady Gaga.

And so, I found myself in a digital dilemma: Is my love for Spotify going to destroy the musicians I love?

"Spotify is a quandary for everyone involved," McKeown told me later.

McKeown turns out to be a good proxy for a typical musician. While her eight albums have never cracked the Top 10, she's made a living as a full-time musician by recording and touring since she was 17. And far from being a Luddite, McKeown has embraced digital and online distribution for years.

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In fact, this year she is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society where she is exploring how to connect policy, art and technology as well as how content creators can make a living in the digital future.

In looking out into the future, the debate comes down to this: Is Spotify adding new revenue, or is it cannibalizing other forms of sales of things like CDs or iTunes downloads?

The music labels that signed deals with Spotify believe it's additive. Essentially, more than one-third of Spotify's listeners are under 24, a demographic that by and large does not pay for music. The music industry sees Spotify as converting nonpayers into payers. Worth noting: Nielsen SoundScan recently reported that sales of albums are up 3 percent this year compared with last.

In a recent interview, Universal Music Group's digital boss Rob Wells praised Spotify for finding a way to get a new generation to pay for music again.

"This is all additional money," Wells told Topspin magazine.

Mike McGuire, a Gartner media analyst, said he frequently hears people debating the size of royalties from downloads versus Spotify at music conferences. It remains to be seen if Spotify can increase the size of the audiences and the amount of listening to generate royalties that equal those of a download.

"Will Spotify get more people into the payment funnel?" McGuire said.

But Ken Parks, a Spotify executive, said that's the wrong way to frame the discussion.

"Spotify has succeeded in the last three years in growing from nothing to 10 million users," Parks said. "It's done so by harvesting people who were pirating music."

Parks notes that of those 10 million users, 2 million are paid. That's a good rate for any digital content service. And he points out that the bulk of the money Spotify collects is paid out to rights holders -- so far more than $165 million.

But if that's all true, then why is McKeown ambivalent? It's probably because of people like me.

After listening to the free version of Spotify for a few weeks, I upgraded to the premium service, which allows me unlimited listens, including through the Spotify app on my iPhone, and no commercials.

I canceled another account with a service called eMusic for which I paid about $10 a month to download 30 songs. After years of collecting cassettes, CDs and digital downloads, I love Spotify because it means never having to worry about buying and managing music again.

In other words, I'm a digital cannibal.

That's potentially bad, since rights holders might get 70 cents out of every 99 cents I spend on a track on iTunes. While the ratio might be similar, a single stream is worth less than a penny on Spotify. Indeed, after having music on Spotify for about three years, McKeown said her total income from the service is $35. "That was a real wake-up call," she said.

As a result, she didn't put her latest album on Spotify, and is focused on selling CDs from her website. She might re-evaluate that in a few months, she added.

As we talked, I asked McKeown what's the right thing for a fan like me to do. I still love Spotify. I have discovered unbelievable amounts of music I never would have heard. And in fact, since meeting McKeown, I've listened to several of her albums, something that I would never have done without Spotify.

McKeown said she didn't recommend quitting Spotify. Instead, she said musicians and fans alike needed to find additional ways to support the music, including seeing them live, buying merchandise, and spreading the word to friends. And yes, when, possible, buying the music outright.

Still, none of these were likely to sustain the average artist in the long run. Like so many other industries affected by the Internet, working out the new business model remains a work in progress.

"Fans who listen to an artist on Spotify should take the next step to support them," McKeown said. "But it's not clear what that next step is."